EDIT: It seems that I have may have gotten the wrong impression about the community structure here from the @TheDude comment I listed below. It looks like this should have been posted to The Agora. I appreciate everyone who took the time to respond. Now I must go find fresh air and see if I can find this grass thing that I have heard so much about.
First, let me say thank you for spending your time and money on creating and maintaining this instance.
Second, the name sh.itjust.works is great. It gives me a little half smile every time I type it.
Third, I am hoping this can be my Fediverse home base but I have a single concern.
Now on to the meat:
I have been over on lemmy.world for the last few days and really enjoying the content and experience, but as I was learning more about the Fediverse I realized they have blocked a whole slew of other instances. Most of the reason I have grown to dislike and distrust reddit over the years was because of their random subreddit bans that didn’t follow their own rules and processes, so it was a pretty big turn-off for me looking at the lemmy.world Instances List.
When I heard this instance only had two blocked instances, I immediately came here to check it out. I quickly saw like-minded individuals genuinely engaging in reasonable discussion about what should and should not be defederated, so I decided to go ahead and make an account. It didn’t take long though before I decided to look into why each of the instances were banned.
It seems like burggit allows simulated CP which is a pretty decent reason for blocking them in my mind. On the other hand, the only thing I could find about lemmygrad.ml was this (https://sh.itjust.works/comment/130474) post that says you blocked it because of your personal convictions.
Given that this instance is your own personal project, I certainly don’t fault you for choosing what is acceptable and what is not, but I am concerned about making sh.itjust.works my home base if it is just the start. Based on the previous post it doesn’t seem like something you are going to change your mind about, nor do I have an interest in trying to convince you to do so. What I would like to know is if this is going to be a regular thing.
Are you intending to block any instances with political opinions that you are staunchly against? Further, are you planning to create any sort of standard for what kind of instance you are likely or unlikely to ban in the future?
Bonus question for my curiosity: What makes lemmygrad so against your personal convictions? While I have a basic understanding of Marxism/Communism and am aware that current communist countries have a pretty questionable history of violence and suppressing personal and political freedoms, I think an objective viewer might say the same thing about the representative republic that I live in.
tl;dr: Are you going to block other instances for personal reasons? Also, are you going to create any standards to indicate which instances may be blocked in the future?
Hi Nahvi.
Thanks for posting this well put together post. I can tell that you put some time and thought into this and I want you to know that I recognize that.
Regarding your concern, this is a topic that has been brought up numerous times over the past month. I’ve since moved towards being more community driven, letting users discuss and debate on topics that are important to them. These discussion move forward towards a vote over a 7 day period. This process will change over time as we come across flaws and look for ways solve them together.
One more thing I want to make clear regarding your tl;dr question Will I be blocking other instances for personal reasons? Short answer is no, I believe the community should determine what should or should not be blocked.
That being said I want to make myself clear that there are limitations, I will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech, terrorism, CP, loli, trolling and instances that become bot instances. These shouldn’t be things that need to be justified, I think they fall under the “be a good human” category.
I hope this clarifies your concerns and you continue to make sh.itjust.works your home.
@TheDude
Hello and thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.
I appreciate you clarifying your stance on future blocking for both personal reasons and along the human decency lines. While I may lean fairly deeply into free speech territory, I also recognize the need for certain limits. The balance you’ve struck seems to be very reasonable, though I admit to being a hair surprised by the community driven approach.
I look forward to seeing which direction the community takes the instance.
I hope Lemmy will one day support defederating from content and users separately. As I wrote in other threads already, and I will just take your word for it that lemmygrad really is promoting hate speech, I can understand and support defederation from instances pr9moting hate speech, but at the same rime, it robs me of the opportunity to engage with tgeir users even on other platforms. As such, if the option to separately defederate from content and users ever becomes available, I hope the lemmygrad users will be federated again.
will continue to defederate instances that openly promote or spreads hate speech
That’s great but please define hate speech and give us some examples.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation”.
Are you planning to actively moderate against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia?
I think part of it had to do with genocide denial being pretty rampant there and way outnumbering the number of users in new instances when the reddit blackout started. One of the top posts here when the instance was new was asking if the admin even allowed discussing the topic. I think @god made the post I’ll see if I can find it.
I think this is the thread https://sh.itjust.works/post/37624
Bear in mind, that lemmygrad.ml is not lemmy.ml. The latter instance is run by the devs.
That is quite the interesting thread. Especially that History of Lemmy link. Not sure what I expected but it wasn’t that.
The instance called lemmygrad promotes an ideology that’s considered extremist by many instance owners, so it has been defederated by many big instances. The other ones one the list that are defederated because of an unusual number of users to content ratio, leading many instance owners to suspect that they are bot accounts used for spam so any instance with these suspicions are also defederated, not because of ideology, buy simply because of the perceived spam threat. Now I don’t know how true is the bot threat, but that is what people have been saying is the reason for defederation.
If this was one of the larger instances that has defederated a bunch of instances like lemmy.world, I wouldn’t have blinked that it defederated another one. Sh.itjust.works has exactly two blocked instances, one of which seems to invite pedos the other seems like a political group. In my mind, those are a bit different and worth asking a question or two about before deciding this place isn’t as welcoming as it seemed from the outside.
They are supporters of authoritarian regimes who regularly raid comment sections and spam communities to push their views. The above comment said who decided, the instance owners. If you’d like to know who they are you can visit the instances that have them blocked and check who the owner is.
I’m gonna park my car here for this.
Firstly, welcome. I hope you choose to stick around.
Lemmygrad.ml is blocked and will almost certainly remain blocked. Any further discussion of that topic is moot. I understand your point, but to be frank, they only have about 700 active users. They simply don’t have very much to contribute, even if they were commenting in good faith. And they obviously aren’t, given how many instances have defederated them.
Going forward, the decision to defederate instances is not going to be taken lightly. I don’t speak for TheDude, but my understanding of defederation is that it should be utilized defensively, rather than aggressively. If another server is harassing our users, disrupting our communities, or otherwise preventing our server from flourishing, then we will consider defederation.
Barring that extent of conflict, the block functionality exists so that individual users can protect themselves from unwanted content without compromising the integrity of the federated model.
You will have the opportunity to raise any arguments in favor of or against defederation in the relevant discussion thread that will be posted to the Agora prior to the vote.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/agora
We do not have any intention of becoming beehaw here, but we also need to protect the standard of discourse that has already emerged on this server.
I hope I have addressed your concerns. Let me know if there’s anything I left out.
You’ve been here 3 weeks and 3 of your first 6 comments, weeks ago, are also asking why lemmygrad was blocked, on multiple different servers. Didn’t Lemmy.one and lemmy.fmhy.ml already tell you why? You’re not asking in good faith.
Seems like they might not want to say, but the overall point is that it seems like they don’t have to. If that is bothersome to you, you may want to move to a different instance, warn people about the fact that this can be done without explanation or any number of things that you can do for you, but simply calling them out over and over doesn’t seem terribly productive.
Edit: What I mean to say it’s that you seem to be complaining about the fact that they can defederate without explaining themselves, but instead of saying that you seem to be passive-aggressively just posting an observation insinuating that that is the problem. Not every post is going to be a direct explanation of why they did a thing and picking one post and complaining that there aren’t other posts with the answer you want is poor conversational skills.
Have you seen the comments there?
It’s all extreme liberal hate.
I’m not really interested in hearing about why trans people deserve to die, or people complaining about a trans influencer being on a beer can. If I wanted to hear that, I’d visit my parents.
You can be a right wing person without resorting to such extreme hate. There’s really no need for that shit.
right wing? they are marxist-leninist communists, they’re as left wing as it gets.
I appreciate the thorough response, but yeah, you kind of did miss my main question. I am just trying to find out if it is @TheDude’s intention to block other subs that conflict too strongly with his views.
I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
The users themselves will be voting on who to ban. I cannot speak for TheDude, but his decision to set up a democratic forum for voting on server decisions surely speaks for itself, no?
I really don’t care much one way or another if one instance that I am pretty unlikely to interact with is blocked, but I want to find out if it is a single event or if he just hasn’t had a chance to ban all the groups that offend him.
It’s a single event. Anything else?
Nope, that is it. Though I would have liked to have heard it from the proverbial horse’s mouth.
